geek, I’m thinking about building a robot that would push up my glasses for me; it could clip to a pocket protector and use solar power. And LEDs – it’d have to have LEDs.Okay, so maybe I’m not quite that bad, but I’m a technogeek nonetheless. Hey, I work in the tech industry; it helps keep me interested in what I do, and it helps earn us money so we can pay the bills. On the other hand, sometimes it COSTS us money… and for that, I blame Apple.
See, the only reason I haven’t gotten an iPhone yet is that we just re-upped for a two-year stint on T-Mobile earlier this year, and of course the iPhone is AT&T specific (until someone comes up with a way to unlock it easily, at any rate,) so I can’t in good conscience justify paying tons of money to break our T-Mobile contract, and I don’t want to enter into a second two-year contract with a second mobile provider just so I could have an iPhone while Lucie uses the T-Mobile service. Technogeekism does have its limits.
And Steve Jobs knows this, and I’m fairly sure he’s overheard me talking about it in our car (since I’m also fairly certain Jobs has every single vehicle in the greater Bay Area bugged so he can listen to our conversations, as part of his insidious plans for world domination.) So he comes out with the iPod Touch, combining all the awesome cool factor of the touch screen, the amazing quality video playback, the sleek and purty and oh so shiny polished metal and black glass design, and the incredibly user-friendly menu interaction of the iPhone, and without the required 24-month shackles to AT&T. Sure, it doesn’t have the digital camera or the EDGE online capabilities that the iPhone has, but to make up for that the iPod Touch does have Wi-Fi capability, so whenever you go to a Wi-Fi enabled location (Starbuck’s, hotels; even a few McDonald’s restaurants I’ve seen) you can use the integrated Safari browser and go surfing to your geeky little heart’s content.
Don’t want to carry around printouts or struggle with road maps? Get the map you want online, save it as a JPEG, and toss it on your iPod. You can access the map image, zoom in by double-tapping the screen, and scroll around the image by simply dragging your finger to move the map. Maybe not as cutting edge as having GPS-based navigation system, but as long as you can read street signs you can get from point A to point B using technology that causes envy among your friends.
Missed that episode of Psych yesterday? Download it to your Touch, and spend your lunch break at work snorting chicken noodle soup out of your nose at the wacky hijinks those boys get into on that wide screen goodness. Assuming you’re eating chicken noodle soup, at any rate. If you’re eating meatloaf and you snort chicken noodle soup out of your nose, call the doctor. And Ripley’s.The iPod Touch advertisements online say they they’ll ship by the 28th, but a few websites say that the iPods are available in stores as of late last week. So Friday evening, we go to the Apple Store at Valley Fair Mall and I poke my head in. Sorry, I'm told; they’re sold out already (less than 48 hours after being set on the shelves!) Luckily, we’re headed to Oakridge Mall after that anyway, so I go to the Apple store in Oakridge… and they’re sold out there as well.
Argh!
I get the numbers of the Apple stores in Palo Alto (Stanford Shopping Center), Walnut Creek, Pleasanton, and Los Gatos, and two stores in San Francisco. Sold out, sold out, sold out, sold out, and sold out at both.
Argh!
So let’s try NON-Apple stores. I get the numbers for Best Buy at Santana Row, Almaden, Mountain View, Cupertino, and Gilroy. Sold out, sold out, sold out, sold out… and we have A COUPLE LEFT AT THE BEST BUY IN GILROY OHMIGODOHMIGOD IT’S LIKE MEETING BRUCE CAMPBELL IN PERSON weneedtogotoGilroyNOWNOWNOWNOWNOW.
I convince Lucie that we need to go to Gilroy (though, seeing as how the outlet stores are there, it wasn’t that difficult to do), and I do my best Dale Earnhardt Jr. impression on my way down there.
We get there, get out of Meg, and I practically fly into the store, running like a diuretic Dachshund, knocking down old women in walkers and pushing children in wheelchairs out of my way in my mad dash to the iPod area… and they have One. 16GB. iPod. Touch. Left. I do my best not to squeal like a Canadian schoolgirl meeting Mike Ricci, and calmly say, “I’ll take it.”
I’m pretty sure Lucie bought some stuff at some other store, and I think I went some place else and did something too, but in all honesty I’m too busy petting my new technology and making happy cooing noises to pay any attention. I just hope I didn’t do anything embarrassing that was caught on video.
Although… if I did, do me a favor and put it on YouTube; I’ll check it out on my iPod Touch.
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The world's most frightening IKEA spokesman, on that nifty widescreen.
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